Introduction:Polish artist Karolina Matea is traveling to Hong Kong in Nov and Dec to have her artist-in-residence project in ACO, Wan Chai. Besides working on her own art pieces, in order to encourage more opportunities for cultural exchanges, she would like to show a glimpse of the recent contemporary art scene in Poland to Hongkongers in a talk, and share her expertise on jewellery design in different courses for the public.

About the Talk: In this talk, Karolia will show us a glimpse of the recent contemporary art scene in Poland. In fact, the Contemporary art in Poland is quite interesting, especially after 1989. On that year Poland stopped to be a communist country with omnipresent censorship. New democracy gave artists freedom of speech. In 1990s the strongest trend was the Critical Art- critical descriptions of reality and to comment on contemporary life. Polish art after year 2000 turned toward the iconosphere of popular culture. Art began increasingly to simulate popular culture, changing in terms of its form, (with younger artists more willingly employing painting), and in terms of the weight of the problems it explored.

About the Artist Karolina Matea:Working with many different media, Karolina Matea recently focuses on jewellery design, installations, and different projects in public space. One of her recent works is 'Hong Kong Poems,' a graphic project that was inspired by her trip to Hong Kong in 2006 and was awarded with Talens Prize on National Drawing Exhibition in Torun, Poland.

Karolina earned a scholarship in International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria and graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland in jewellery design in 2004. She then graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland with her master degree in art education in 2007. Besides, she is the founder of Puck’s Cultural Society, which is actively promoting art, integrating local community through art, organizing exhibitions and workshops in Puck, Poland.